February 5, 2021: Trump Creates Zero Jobs During Four Years in White House

 

2/5/21: The jobs report for January 2021 was released today. Even if we credit Trump with every job added for the month, he goes out not with a bang, or even a whimper, but a moan.

 

Jobs added under President Trump:

 

2017:   1,978,000 (February-December)

2018:   2,318,000

2019:   2,011,000

2020:      604,000 (January-February)

2021:      233,000 (January)

 

Total:  6,911,000 jobs added, counting all the good months of his first and only term in office.

 

Then we count the jobs lost as the coronavirus (which Trump said was only a flu) spread health and hiring havoc: 

March-April (2020)   -22,362,000 jobs. 

Then we count jobs recovered as businesses began to reopen and the pandemic seemed to die down (May-November of last year): 

+12,648,000. 

Then we subtract jobs lost in December 2020: - 306,000. 

Finally, we give him credit for all of January 2021, even though Joe Biden took over on January 20. 

January 2021:  233,000 jobs added.

 

Then we tally up the jobs added during Reject-President Trump’s watch comes out to …WTF… a negative number. 

Barring slight revisions for his last two months in charge, he created: 

- 2,876,000 jobs.

 

That’s right, Trump fans. No jobs gained in four years, despite a boom for impeachment defense lawyers. 

The unemployment rate ticks downward in January 2021 to 6.3 percent, or 1.6 points higher than when Obama left office. 

The Labor Participation Rate fell to its lowest point ever, at 61.4 percent, again, lower by 1.4 points than on the day Trump took the oath of office (which he promptly started to ignore). According to one estimate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics more than 4,000,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force during 2020. 

Last, but not least, if you are a coal miner, Trump’s brilliant leadership in the imaginary “War on Coal” saw employment in the coal mines drop from 50,900 to 42,400 to start President Biden off. 

A grim picture, overall.

Trump is Winning the Imaginary War on Coal

AS A FORMER HISTORY TEACHER, I try to stick to proven facts on my blog. For example, I rarely quote Democratic politicians when I’m mocking President Trump. That would be like shooting obese orange fish in a puddle.

If you want to make fun of Trump, facts always suffice.

So, today, I thought it might be fun to consider the gory “War on Coal,” declared, as near I can tell, by “Muslim Obama.”

Luckily, right-wingers have Trump and all the other freedom fighters at Fox News to save our coal and also save our tinsel in the equally terrible, “War on Christmas.” 

That war was also declared by President Barack Hussein (“Did We Mention He’s A Muslim”) Obama.

By the way, if you believe in facts and not in Santa Claus, Obama isn’t a Muslim

And if you truly believed in equality, you might have the sense to know it wouldn’t matter if he was.

But today’s focus is not on Muslims, or liberals who want to kill and eat Donner and Blizten! Today, we are focusing on the “War on Coal!” If we can go back to the days of St. Ronald of Reagan, we know for sure there were no Muslims in the Oval Office and we can be equally sure that coal miners had a friend in the White House. Okay, maybe not a friend of coal miners’ unions.

Whatever! Let’s move on.

At least, St Ronald never declared war on coal. Bureau of Labor Statistics (which only go back to 1985 on the chart I can find) show that in January 1985 there were 170,500 coal miners at work in this great country.

Under Obama, that number fell to 50,700 in January 2017, that dirty bastard! Hey, did the right-wingers mention lately, he was born in Kenya????

So: BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, Obama.

Machinery replaced men with picks and shovels.

LET’S PUT UP A FEW MORE NUMBERS to shed some real light on your typical Fox News talking point. By January 1989, when Reagan’s second term ended, only 136,400 coal miners were still at work. That meant there had been a loss of 34,100 jobs in the mines; but this was not a war on coal. 

Nope.

Reagan loved miners. Obama hated them because he was a communist, not to mention a Muslim.

I know. That combination doesn’t make sense; but we are employing Fox News logic here and we are focusing on the “War on Coal!”

Luckily, America elected another Republican, George H. W. Bush in 1988. By January 1993, when he left office, the number of coal miners hard at work had risen…I mean, fallen…to 112,400.

Scratch another 24,000 coal mining jobs.

Next came Bill Clinton. By the time he finished his eight years in office, having chased Monica Lewinsky around the Oval Office until she was dizzy, only 71,300 coal miners remained. That meant another 41,100 jobs lost, not as bad as the combined jobs lost in the eight previous years under Republican leadership.

Still, if you were a miner, the trend lines really sucked; and as a good liberal, my sympathies always go to the working stiffs.

Under George W. Bush, coal mining rebounded, and everything was great in America again. Well, not counting when the entire economy crashed in 2008. You remember that great time—when the economy shed 3,889,000 jobs between February 2008 and the end of January 2009. 

Of course, fracking hadn’t caught on and the price of natural gas wasn’t undercutting the price of coal yet. From January 2001 through January 2009, jobs in the coal mines rose to 86,400. So that would be a gain of fifteen thousand plus.

Then came the “War on Coal,” launched for nefarious, flag-hating, un-American reasons by tree-hugging libtards, led by Commie Obama, or Muslim Obama, take your right-wing pick. 

And three years later, even with a recession to wrestle, coal mining jobs had increased to 89,700. In other words, Obama had declared war on coal and then coal jobs, for three years, still increased.

Only then did the decline set in again.

When President Obama left office in January 2017, only 50,700 coal mining jobs remained. That meant in his eight years in office, 35,700 coal miners died in bloody imaginary warfare, compared to 58,100 miners wiped out during St. Ronald of Reagan’s second term and George H. W. Bush’s single term.

IN OTHER WORDS, if you cared about facts, you had to ask: Did St. Ronald of Reagan hate coal miners himself?

I wasn’t able to find Bureau of Labor Statistics charts for the years before 1985; but this chart from WikiCommons makes clear the grim historical trends. The scale makes it hard to read. But it would appear there were roughly 250,000 coal miners at work in January 1981, when St. Ronald took charge.

And that would make him by far the biggest killer of coal mining jobs (roughly 115,000 during his two terms) in the last forty years.

The reality—if you have at least one eyeball that functions and you do more than stare at the leggy babes on Fox News—there never has been a “war” on coal. The trends  for decades, including the decline of the United Mine Workers, which Republicans have always cheered, have been running strongly against the miners and the miners’ families. The trends have been crippling states where mining once supported towns and entire counties and provided good-paying employment to those who preferred not to go to college and get degrees in teaching or engineering or computer science.

But if you had tried to blame Obama for a “War on Buggies,” your argument would make about as much sense.

There was no “War on Coal.” There wasn’t even a skirmish. 

Harsh economic changes were at work. Improved machinery and methods of extraction killed hundreds of thousands of mining jobs, starting a century ago. Changes in mining methods—from deep mining to hilltop leveling—killed tens of thousands more. And the decline in demand for coal has meant the elimination of many jobs that remained. The prices of solar power and natural gas have both fallen dramatically in recent years. And no president, not St. Ronald, not Obama, and not the big orange blimp in the White House today, is going to be able to turn back an this unfortunate historical clock.

You knew, for example, that coal was in terrible trouble, not because of President Obama, but because of changing realities when the Kentucky Coal Museum installed eighty solar panels on its roof in 2017.

Again, there never was any “War on Coal.” 

You couldn’t win it because it wasn’t being fought. It was more like a “War on Reality” waged by Trump and Fox News.

*

Has there been a slight uptick in jobs under Donald J. Trump. I mean for coal miners, not lawyers to defend him in court?

Yes. We now have 53,200 miners at work, a bump up of 2,500.

By contrast, the U.S. Department of Energy reported last year that there were 373,807 people working in the solar energy field. (See page 29 of the DOE report.) So, you could argue, if you wished to distort economics that President Trump declared “War on the Sun” when he imposed tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels earlier this year.

To understand how bogus the “War on Coal”  has always been all you really have to do is look at the facts.

And try to think.

POSTSCRIPT: AS A GUY WHO SUPPORTS good pay for workers, I understand exactly why coal miners are mad.

As a liberal, I wish they’d all unionize tomorrow (only about 3 percent are unionized today) and strike for better wages and benefits the next day. 

I wish a lot of workers would unionize and fight for higher pay. I wish the average coal miner, the average teacher, the average butcher, the average baker (whether or not he wants to bake a cake for the gay couple), the average candlestick maker, the average police officer, carpenter, plumber, electrician and teamster would all unionize next week and go on strike nationwide next month.

I wish the billionaires didn’t dominate the economy. I’d be happy if they all stopped hiding their money in secret offshore accounts. 

I wish the billionaires weren’t able, particularly in the wake of the Citizens United court decision (decided, 5-4, by the conservatives justices on the U.S. Supreme Court), to buy up politicians wholesale, like purchasing a quart of milk and a carton of eggs.

I wish guys like Wilbur Ross, our current Commerce Secretary, and Steve Mnuchin, our current Treasury Secretary, didn’t park their dough in places like the Cayman Islands, out of reach of the IRS. 

I wish they didn’t dodge taxes which the rest of us pay.

Last, but not least, I wish the president would release his taxes (apparently under audit for all eternity) so we could find out the truth. Is that chunky fat cat paying as much, percentage-wise, as the average coal miner?

At least the miner who still has a job?

President Trump and the Coal Miner's Granddaughter

At a March 2016 campaign rally, Hillary Clinton told her audience what was going to happen if she won. “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she said. 

At that point, it was already clear that Donald Trump was the most loathsome man ever to run for the nation’s highest office. I knew Secretary Clinton meant she was going to focus on clean energy. Still, it was a tone deaf comment and I thought to myself, If I was a coal miner, I’d probably vote for Trump too.

I was reminded of that incident again one recent morning. I was driving over to my son’s house because I watch my three-year-old granddaughter on Fridays. On the radio NPR was doing an interview with an Ohio miner. He said Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord gave him a “sense of security.” He had “bills to pay.” He only wanted to provide for his family.

I thought he sounded like any good family man. He cared about his wife and children, just as the rest of us care about ours. And that’s a fundamental element in this story. The problem is this tale doesn’t terminate with one coal miner, or one generation, or one snowball (as we shall see).

This story encompasses one planet.

The decision this week by President Trump, who has no better grip on climate science than my granddaughter—and she can be excused because she’s three!—ignores that final element, that one planet. In my mind, if you don’t sympathize with that Ohio miner something is wrong with you. If he loses his place in the mines, or a thousand peers lose theirs, you should hope he wins the lottery and they all get hired by some good company that will still go ahead and pay them $25 or $30 per hour.

(As a card-carrying liberal, I’m for higher wages for the average worker.)

Unfortunately, our country finds itself saddled with an intellectual dwarf in the White House, a man who thinks not in terms of planets but snowballs. 

That means the coal miner’s granddaughter, and Trump’s grandchildren, and yours, and mine, are all going to pay for his gross stupidity.

Mark Twain once joked that everybody complained about the weather but nobody ever did anything about it. There’s a difference, though between climate and weather which Trump seems incapable of processing, despite his constant complaining.

Suppose you went outside one day and the temperature was twelve degrees above normal. Would that be proof global warming and/or climate change was occurring? You would be a fool to argue a position based on a single day’s weather. Yet that has been the level of sophistication Trump has brought to the topic. Sadly, the man in the Oval Office believes in James Inhofe’s snowball.

If you are not familiar with Inhofe, or his snowball, you can be sure, together, they represented complete and willful ignorance. In the winter of 2015, during a cold snap following a blizzard in the nation’s capital, Inhofe carried a snowball into the U.S. Senate. This was not a random snowball, packed by a lawmaker from Oklahoma, where snow is rare and (according to scientists) earthquakes related to fracking are common.

No. This was a proof.

Inhofe stepped to the podium on a cold January day and offered up juvenile analysis: “In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is?” Inhofe directed his remarks to Sen. Bill Cassidy, presiding over a mostly empty Senate chamber. A good guess at that moment might have been: A moron about to offer up a stunt to fool other morons? Alas, Cassidy, a fellow Republican, was not prepared to comment. In dramatic fashion Inhofe pulled out a plastic bag. He opened it. Inside was a snowball. Inhofe removed it. “It’s a snowball,” he explained, pretty much stating the obvious, even for any morons listening at the time. “And it’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”

“We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” Inhofe continued. He was referring to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). “But now the script has flipped,” he insisted.

Only the script hadn’t flipped.

It still hasn’t.

NASA and NOAA were relying on global data, the kind of data Trump has routinely ignored. According to their records 2014 was the hottest year on record. Not one day. Not one city. Not one fool with one snowball.

One planet.

You could go to the NASA website. You could pull it up on the internet. It’s as easy as packing a bit of snow.

For years, however, Trump has been too lazy or too busy grabbing women to bother with any science. He started seeing snowballs in 2011 when he first plunked down in the camp of the willfully ignorant. That fall he tweeted: “It snowed over 4 inches this past weekend in New York City. It is still October. So much for Global Warming.”

No, sir. 

That would be weather.

In the winter of 2012 he looked outside and spotted Frosty the Snowman, still not melting. “It’s freezing and snowing in New York—we need global warming!”

Again: that would be weather.

In 2013 he used slightly better evidence, mentioning trends for an entire month and an entire country: “Looks like the U.S. will be having the coldest March since 1996—global warming anyone?????????”

Only that still wasn’t climate. The year, itself, globally, proved one of the hottest on record.

Trump’s tiny toes turned blue again in December and it was back to complaining about weather, but not doing anything about it. “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee—I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” he tweeted.

In 2014 he offered up another nugget of Trumpian wisdom: “Baltimore just set a record for the coldest day in March in a long recorded history -4 degrees. Other places likewise. Global warming con!”

He even backed up Inhofe in January 2015 with this fact-deprived, flailing stab at scientific thinking: “It’s record cold all over the country and world—where the hell is global warming, we need some fast!”

So, was it a hoax? Was 2014 the hottest year ever? 

NASA said it was.

What happened in 2015, the year that began in promising fashion, with James Inhofe’s snowball? Again, relying of worldwide data, from all four seasons, five oceans and seven continents, scientists said it was the new hottest year on record.

NASA reported.

The year did end on a hopeful note when the Paris Climate Accord was ratified and signed by 195 nations. It wasn’t a perfect document, because no human document is. But because the danger was clear, nations united.

By chance, six months before, Trump had opened his campaign for president. As one might have expected, he continued to display a complete lack of understanding of simplest science. At one point he sat down with loyalists at Fox News and said: “Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax.” People who studied it were probably only in it to make “a lot of money.”

Then the numbers were tabulated again—by dedicated men and women at NASA and NOAA. Once more, 2016 turned out to be the new hottest year on record. In fact, sixteen of the hottest seventeen had occurred in this young century. That’s why 194 nations still support the Paris agreement.

As for the United States, we now link arms in solidarity only with rogue nations Nicaragua and Syria.

In the end, we should sympathize with the coal miner and his plight. We should do what we can to help all workers in a similar predicament. But if we blow this battle, as President Trump seems intent on doing, we must surely fear for the coal miner’s granddaughter. 

I know I fear for my grandchildren. 

You should fear for yours.